Ken^2

I've recently had to make a decision regarding where I want to work; a decision which I'm not sure I was ready to make. Unfortunately, life doesn't take rain checks, so my hand has been forced so to speak. I had originally narrowed my choices down to L.A., Sacramento, NYC, and Boston, but after thinking it through some more, I decided that NYC and LA were out. NYC's cost of living is just too high at a staggering 55% above DC, and LA is just... well, too LA.

As of 3 days ago, I was sure that Boston was my top choice, and Sacramento as the runner up. Now however, I'm not exactly sure. Each has its own pros and cons.

Boston is a great city, altho I'm not too into the whole historical aspect of it. In addition, my cousin Jennings (yes, thats his first name, and yes, he was named after Peter Jennings) would be there, not to mention all my housing concerns would be solved since I could just sublease from Tristan.

Sacramento on the other hand, is in CA. I just remember stepping out from the SAC airport, and being overwhelmed with the greeness of the whole city. I'm sure Tristan would agree with me when I say that I've never seen grass so green before. Granted that the whole experience was a short one, but driving along the highways out in CA felt like a scene from a movie.

I'm quite torn as to which city I'm pulling for, but hopefully I'll know by the end of next week.

welcome to a brighter and more colorful ken^2. The dreary & dark colors of the previous site just got too depressing for me as time went on. It was neat at first, but I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a big fan of goth colors. As far as this redesign is concerned, I'd like to claim credit for the whole thing, but I can't. I actually got the color & banner ideas from this site. At any rate, I'm quite pleased at how everything turned out.

I just found this site, www.allofmp3.com. Its a Russian based mp3 store, kinda like Itunes, except they charge 1 cent per MB downloaded. A review is here. It seems to be a legit site, as far as dealing w/ CC transactions go. The legality of the downloaded MP3's though, seem to be kinda gray. In Russia apparently, companies pay a flat fee to record companies, and artists are the only ones that recieve compensation per song sold. I guess since record companies get a majority of $$$ from a sale of a song, by not having to pay this in Russia, allofmp3 can offer the songs for cheap. I think people are saying its anywhere from $.70-$1.50 for an album depending on size. Their selection seems to be quite good too, and the coolest thing is their online encoding, which lets you choose the bitrate & format you want your songs encoded in. I'm gona give this a try soon, and i'll post results.

Theres also another site http://club.mp3search.ru that is basically the same thing, but w/o the online encoding. They both charge 1 cent/MB, but each site has some albums that the other doesn't have.